You often hear the mainstream bodybuilding press say that 80% of success in bodybuilding is down to diet - do yourself a favour and ignore this nonsense!

A well thought out bodybuilding program is the 80% - just think about this for a second - if your diet is good, but your bodybuilding program is lousy, you won't make any gains - you have to give the growth stimulus to your muscles or they won't grow, no matter what your diet consists of.

People who tell you that the 80% is diet are probably trying to sell you bodybuilding supplements.

In reality, success in bodybuilding is down to;

1/ A good bodybuilding program - 80%

2/ Decent diet - 10%

3/ Getting properly recovered - 10%

This article looks at how you can design your own routines - which is very valuable information to have, because you will always be your own best trainer as nobody will ever know your own body better than you.

Lets look at designing your own bodybuilding programs, so that you become the best that you can be. Here are five things to think about;

1/ Two or at the absolute most three workout days a week.

Muscle grows at rest - fact. If you're in the gym four, five or even worse six times a week you have almost no chance of making muscle gains - assuming you're not doing drugs - and I really hope for your own sake that you're not.

2/ Your programme needs to cover all the major muscle groups in the body in the fewest number of exercises - for this reason you should focus on major compound exercises like the squat, dead lift, and bench press.

If you tried to train your entire body using small isolation movements like the pec deck fly, tricep kick back and so on, it will take ages to cover all the muscle groups in the body.

But a couple of really hard sets of the squat will cover the entire lower body, and a good part of the upper body muscle groups as well.

3/ You need to pay special attention to the lower body and the back areas - this goes against mainstream bodybuilding instruction, where you see endless queues at the bench press or the pec deck stations.

The legs and lower back form around 70% of the entire muscle mass in your body - never forget this. The fastest way to get bigger is to build the biggest muscles in the body - which means the major leg and back muscles.

4/ Your workouts should be hard and brief- try and keep them under the hour - this gives you the maximum chance to recover - but the workouts must be hard.

Each workout should build on the workout that went before it - which means adding small amounts of weight to the bar whenever you can, whilst keeping your exercise form really tight.

5/ Eliminate any dangerous exercises from your bodybuilding program - for example, the upright row, bent over row, smith machine squat and any pressing movement behind the neck. All these exercises (and there are others too) are very bad for the joints, and can cause long term damage. If you get injured you can't make any gains in muscle.

So there are five things to consider when you design your own bodybuilding program - good luck.